Hitachi – Yottabytes: Storage and Disaster Recoveryhttp://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/storage-disaster-recovery
Sharon Fisher on issues, trends, and analysis in storage and disaster recovery.Wed, 30 Nov 2016 23:34:01 +0000en-UShourly1Fun With Hard Drive Statisticshttp://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/storage-disaster-recovery/fun-with-hard-drive-statistics/
http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/storage-disaster-recovery/fun-with-hard-drive-statistics/#respondTue, 28 Jun 2016 04:08:44 +0000http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/storage-disaster-recovery/?p=1626Backup service Backblaze has released the quarterly report on its hard drive statistics. While there wasn’t anything new that particularly leapt out of this report, the company noted that it has now passed one billion hours of disk drive operation. Or, as Backblaze director of product marketing Andy Klein notes in a blog post, 42 million...

]]>Backup service Backblaze has released the quarterly report on its hard drive statistics. While there wasn’t anything new that particularly leapt out of this report, the company noted that it has now passed one billion hours of disk drive operation. Or, as Backblaze director of product marketing Andy Klein notes in a blog post, 42 million days or 114,155 years’ worth of spinning hard drives.

Which is what’s valuable about the report. People can do their own hard drive testing, but when it comes to sheer volume, there’s hardly anyone who uses disk drives more consistently. And while there may be others of a similar volume – Google and Facebook come to mind – they don’t typically release this sort of data to the public.

That doesn’t necessarily mean, of course, that you might see the same sort of performance yourself – anybody can get a bum drive – but it’s a good way to bet. Backblaze uses commodity hard drives to build “pods” where they strip off everything extraneous and cram as many drives as possible into rack space. (They even changed out the power switch this year after finding a cheaper model.) The company then builds a “vault” out of 20 pods, which totals 1,200 hard drives. It fills at least three vaults a month.

The design of the pod – which is open-sourced – gets updated periodically. For example, Backblaze is now using pods of 60 drives – though they poke out the back of the server rack — instead of 45, giving it a capacity of up to 480TB, which costs the company less than a nickel per gigabyte. “That’s a 33 percent increase to the storage density in the same rack space,” writes Klein. “Using 4TB drives in a 60-drive Storage Pod increases the amount of storage in a standard 40U rack from 1.8 to 2.4 Petabytes. Of course, by using 8TB drives you’d get a 480TB data storage server in 4U server and 4.8 Petabytes in a standard rack,” he adds.

Such changes don’t save much on an individual basis, but add up, Klein writes. “Saving $0.008 per GB may not seem very innovative, but think about what happens when that trivial amount is multiplied across the hundreds of Petabytes of data,” he writes.

So here’s the noteworthy information about this quarter.

The company has 61,590 hard drives, an increase of 9.5 percent over year-end 2015, when they evaluated 56,224.

There are seven kinds of drives where they had no failures: Hitachi 4TB (the 4040B), Hitachi 8TB, Seagate 1.5TB, Seagate 6TB, Toshiba 4TB, Toshiba 5TB, and Western Digital 4TB.

The three kinds of drives with the worst failure rates are the Seagate 4TB, the Toshiba 3TB, and Western Digital 2TB. Note that these are among the oldest drives the company has. The company also points out that because it only has a few of the Toshiba 3TB drives, that figure is based on a single drive failure.

Since a year ago at this time, Backblaze has stopped using four kinds of drives, all from Seagate: two 3TB models, a 2TB model, and one of its two 1.5TB models. This was partly due to low capacity and partly to their high failure rates.

At this point, the majority of the drive hours are on 4TB drives. “The 4TB drives have been spinning for over 580 million hours,” Klein writes. “There are 48,041 4TB drives which means each drive on average had 503 drive days of service, or 1.38 years. The annualized failure rate for all 4TB drives lifetime is 2.12 percent.”

Of the four primary manufacturers the company uses – Hitachi, Seagate, Toshiba, and Western Digital – Seagate by far has the highest failure rate (though it’s dropped significantly since last year), followed by Western Digital. Hitachi is the lowest.

That said, Backblaze these days is buying primarily Seagate and Hitachi drives, because they’re easier to find in large (5,000 to 10,000) quantities at a time for a reasonable price.

Backblaze doesn’t use many 6-, 8-, and 10TB drives, because they are either too expensive per terabyte or they aren’t available in a large enough quantity.

The company primarily uses 5400 rpm drives, because it doesn’t need the speed of the 7200 rpm drives and they use less electricity.

Seagate 8TB SMR drives didn’t work well for their purposes in their environment.

Critics point out that in some cases, Backblaze is comparing Hitachi enterprise-class drives (which purportedly are intended for a heavier load) with consumer-grade Seagate drives, and various other quibbles about different ways that different types and ages of drives can be compared. That said, it’s still a useful batch of data.

]]>http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/storage-disaster-recovery/fun-with-hard-drive-statistics/feed/0‘Size Matters,’ Storage Vendors Sayhttp://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/storage-disaster-recovery/size-matters-storage-vendors-say/
http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/storage-disaster-recovery/size-matters-storage-vendors-say/#commentsTue, 16 Sep 2014 18:22:02 +0000http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/storage-disaster-recovery/?p=1066Okay, it’s official: Storage vendors are all a big bunch of size queens. Just a couple of weeks after Seagate announced an 8TB drive, Western Digital has announced a 10TB drive. And if you prefer an SD card? SanDisk has just announced a 512GB card. That’s half a TB. Grunt. (This is probably a good...

(This is probably a good time to reminisce about how my first computer had a hard disk as an add-on that was the size of the computer itself and cost the same amount — for 10MB. Yes, I’m old, whippersnapper, and get off my lawn.)

The Western Digital drive, like the Seagate drive, uses shingled magnetic recording technology, which puts more data in the same space though it’s is slower. In fact, Western Digital comes right out and says the drive is mainly intended for “cold storage” facilities.

That means “slow,” because you put stuff in cold storage that you don’t need all the time, and so you spin down the drives rather than keep them running all the time because it saves energy. So every time you retrieve something from cold storage, you have to go kick the drive to start it up again. It’s like keeping the beer in the fridge out in the garage. You can put a lot more beer out there, but you have to traipse out to the garage every time you want a beer.

There’s one big difference between the 8TB Seagate and the Western Digital UltraStar HE10 — well, besides the size. The Western Digital 10TB drive uses the helium technology it first announced last November for its 6TB drive, while the Seagate drive doesn’t. (Hence the He in the product name.)

We don’t know how much it’s going to cost. Western Digital claimed it would have the lowest cost per gigabyte in the industry, but didn’t release actual prices. Some sources, such as ExtremeTech, were dubious about this. That said, the helium-filled 6TB drives cost from $449.99 to $899.99, depending on the source, compared with commodity-level 6TB drives costing $275, according to Backblaze.

(Can I just say how awesome it is to speak of “commodity-level 6TB drives.” What a world we live in.)

Similarly, the 512GB SanDisk Extreme PRO SDKX UHS-I memory card comes at a premium price: $800. (Though you can get it for $729 some places.) Considering that you can get 32GB cards for 50 cents a gigabyte, that may seem a little high. But the disk is aimed at high-end audio-video people for things like recording 4K video, so they don’t have to swap storage in and out so often.

This is not intended for Dad recording the kids opening presents at Christmas, is what I’m saying.

But at some point we do have to raise the question: Just how big should a single storage device be? I’m not talking about “10MB was good enough for me and it should be good enough for you kids!” I’m thinking about things like reliability. How do you back the things up? And, more to the point, how much data are you willing to lose? When’s the last time you accidentally laundered an SD card you left in your pants pocket?

Lossage is particularly an issue for the helium-filled drives. Yes, yes, we know they’re guaranteed for five years, but getting your $499 back is going to be cold comfort if in the process you’ve lost $10,000 worth of data. The 6TB devices have been out for only a few months, and it’s not clear just what the MTBF rate is going to be for them. Even the MIT Technology Review said last year that it would probably take a year before anyone had any idea of how well they’d last.

Sadly, the world of disk drive testing isn’t what it used to be. As we’ve mentioned before, weirdly, some of the best disk drive testing is done by BackBlaze, but since these helium-filled drives aren’t commodity items it’s unlikely that BackBlaze is testing them yet. We can hope that CNET or ZDnet happened to buy a few of them, set them up in a corner somewhere, and is preparing to give us a great review in a couple of months about just how long we can expect the helium to last, but personally I’m dubious.

One can argue that if the 10TB drives are used in cold storage, you don’t really have to worry that much, because chances are that archived data is stored in multiple places anyway. Well, perhaps, but that raises the question of what the point is. Helium-filled drives cost almost twice as much as commodity non-helium drives, so will a helium-filled drive that’s almost twice as big cost almost four times as much? If so, at what point does the reduction in maintenance and infrastructure make it worthwhile? ExtremeTech points out that according to Western Digital, the power consumption of the drives is 23 percent less than its air-filled drives, and if you have a big enough data center, that would certainly add up, but you’d really want to know how long they’re going to last.

Perhaps the storage vendors are just hoping that storage managers are size queens too.